amanda writes

The Buck has stopped and we're to blame.

I'm Canadian. which means i don't live in the United States but being it's closest neighbour we tend to share many of it's pains and it's pleasures; we both have to put up with every sort of competitive decorating show known to man kind and now we share the fear of what it means when a super power has super fucked up.

People act surprised 'how could they let it happen?' Hmm.
Take a look at your past. ever bought a pair of shoes you didn't really need or maybe a trip you couldn't really afford? Yeah I thought so. Someone where between 1930 and now we lost our common sense and gained a sense of entitlement. We're not all rich. Therefore we can not buy things like we are. Truthfully - i think this realization is actually mind opening and good. I like cashmere sweaters but frankly i'd like to be able to serve my kids breakfast far more and that is what we've lost the sense of; what is important, what is essential and what frankly is unimportant excess.

family is important, education is important, food quality is important, having shelter is important - these are called essentials. Despite what Sex in The City would have us believe Manolo Blahniks are not in fact essential.

Life is good, it provides you with lots of opportunities to make the right and the wrong choices. The past few decades seem to be a lot of bad choices. Our eyes left the ball and got distracted by what the pitcher was wearing. Now were playing the blame game when the truth is we're all at fault; we all wanted bigger, better, more when we didn't really need it. Are you happier with the piles of shit in your closets and basements?

I lived in Africa for a time and I learned an important lesson; the kids there know what makes life good; it's a few simple things: family, shelter; an opportunity to learn because education means freedom and independence, and good food availability so that you aren't starving and ill.

It's time americans and canadians start asking and buying what they NEED as opposed to what they WANT.

At one point you wanted your ex boyfriend or girlfriend remember? But WANTS are fleeting and NEEDS well they're inflexible; they're simply not going to disappear.

a

Morning Sex & 90210

i'm all for sex. really it's great. but i have to admit i'm more of a sex in the afternoon, or really sex at night kind of girl. I'm not sure why. There is of course inherent problems with morning sex; like morning breath and the fact that i love sleep which means to wake up extra early to make time for sex before work etc seems like well 'too prepared' or planned. How do you have spontaneous morning sex if you have to set the alarm so you get up in time to get it on? Then pressing snooze before you have sex well that just seems like bad etiquette.

All the ladies i know say 'men love morning sex' I tend to disagree. I don't think men have a preference for morning sex. I think they have a preference for sex. anytime, anyplace. Morning just happens to located in bed with less clothes so it becomes more of a viable option.

I am alone here? Sex at night just seems more fun, more naughty, more everything. When i wake up the only thing i want in my hand is a cup of coffee.

Perhaps i'm alone in this. on to TV.

An addiction from my youth. - beverly hills 90210 is coming back. nice.
i'm excited in that lame way you are because you know you'll have nothing else to do and you might as well see how bad it's going to be. Sex, mean girls and money on tv and a recession in real life - so heck we'll need something to make us feel better.

which is why i'm thrilled Californication is coming back. I have some bonnet wearing friends who find it 'dirty' or 'pushes the envelope just to be over the top' and i think really? I'm that base on a lot of levels and i think i'm fairly evolved so geez who the heck are all these people who aren't motivated by sex, love, money and the such -because i haven't met them. Maybe my uptight friends just need to have more morning sex. Start the day off with a bang.

amanda

The Hot Dark Knight

I saw Batman; the dark knight over the weekend. hmm. i left slightly confused, but the allegations of assault against Mr. Bale have made it all crystal clear.

Firstly, Heath Ledger was good. He was not great. Plus for me it was an intellectual dilemma. He was psychotic; which as we all know can lend itself to 'cool' -example one being Dexter, but he in fact, did not have a good 'back story' Joker just enjoys being crazy and finds it fun. And he was too weird to be hot so he was just plain weird. I missed the tortured child hood or sad story; and frankly i got bored with it, I was like 'yeah you're crazy but with no achilles heel so who cares?" I lost interest because his motivation felt lacking.

really though my confusion stems from the fact that i like Christian Bale as an actor and frankly just because I have a penchant for tall, sinewy, cut guys who look like they have a bad side. What's not to like? The batman voice. It was a mix of Darth Vader and maybe one of the darker flavoured muppets. I mean seriously did anyone when editing that movie say, "hey his voice seems kind of ridiculous, maybe he should cut that out..." That and the mask makes you focus on lips and chin in a slightly disconcerting way. I wanted him to be tortured and hot but instead i was looking at my watch wondering what made Batman seem like a weak loser.

I left the theatre disappointed that Aaron Eckhardt lost half his face because he was the only one carrying the 'hot and not laughable' flag. Oh well. that's hollywood for you. And clearly with the amount of money made most people will not agree with me.

Which is why the real life story of Christian slagging off to his circus show mom and sister put him back in my good books. I mean batman is a guy who wears a freaky suit and talks funny and if i actually knew a guy who did that i'd almost pee my pants laughing at him each time we had a run in...I'd be right behind Maggie running towards the guy in the Armani suit whose darkside doesn't involve halloween costumes and a voice i've started to call the 'Hoarse Whisperer". However a real man, who gets angry, isn't afraid to get angry and you can swing from his cheek bones - well what can i say; i like my heroes dark with a heavy dose of reality -and the six pack doesn't hurt either.

a

Wax or Shave?

I guess life got a hold of me a few months back and i've been too busy living life to blog. I'd like that to be glamorous and cool but the truth is i've been getting paid to write so suddenly i had no time to write for fun.

I bet all chefs don't cook at home and hookers probably can't understand laying back without some sort of tip. When your skills get a monetary value suddenly you wield your pen and computer differently. but really that's no excuse.

So up here in the wilds of Canada it's finally stopped raining and gotten warm and i have finally bought the bikinis and come out of hiding. but the infernal dilemma of to wax of shave is again an issue.

I like lists but i'm not really a list person as in pros and cons but i am rather torn with this one.

shaving is quick, you pull out the Bic shave the bikini area and legs and you're pretty much good to go. Problem is you have to do the same thing three to four days later. which frankly that gets boring real quick.

Now despite what people say waxing really does sting and it can give you little red bumps that look like a communicable college disease, but the hair is gone and it lasts much longer than shaving. The dilemma?

you have to grow the hair in to wax it. So you spend part of weeks telling people you're hairing 'I'm growing it in..."

I don't care how nice other people are but explaining that the reason you've got a a crotch beard is that you're growing it out so that Helga can pull it all out in a few days - no body wants to know and it looks bad.

So every summer i start out waxing and then i get invited out to a beach party or a boat ride and well frankly I can't wait for Helga it's just got to be done and then well I'm back to shaving.

speaking of which what is up with skirts for bathing suits this year?

suddenly every bikini comes with a optional skirt to buy and wear - is it supposed to hide that you need to shave your bikini area, hide your fat ass, or your big thighs or all of the above? I say if you've got a big bum - flaunt it, and as for bikini hair issue - maybe we should just all go topless -then no one will notice we've got a hairy bikini....

I might be 'damaged' but she's an evil bitch.

As you may or may not know, i love Dexter ( season over long time ago) and Californication (season over even longer) but i have found a new intrigue on TV besides another glorious rendition of some reality show featuring 'fat bastards and snarky botoxed bitches'.

I tuned in last week to watch Damages with Glenn Close and i have to say i'm intrigued. I didn't laugh once and there were no fun penis jokes or crazy writers or honest serial killers instead i found something much more tangible 'cynical evil lawyers'. Now i'm not saying this to be judgemental; my dad was a lawyer and i know for a fact that like many people who know a good lawyer well, not a hack but a good lawyer you're usually pretty sure that if they're not related directly to Satan they are a not too far distant cousin.

Now i love my dad, and i generally like lawyers (call me crazy - it's early imprinting) but Glenn Close in damages makes ice look warm. She's icy, bitchy, scary and you think her vagina might actually eat people. Here's the thing though; bad guys are bad you know; they walk bad, talk bad, often even smell bad so you know bad is walking down the street towards you. Not so with almost insane, genius lawyers, nope- they can put on that uplifting practiced face, put there hand on your shoulder and squeeze it and make you feel loved and moments later stab you in the back while they explain how they've been planning this since two years ago, and man are you a moron. uh huh.

I like the show, i dare say it's smart. Put it makes me feel worse about humans than the idea of a serial killer. Why? Because althought Dexter is killing, he is fact deranged. He was brought up thinking and justifying his acts, he found a way to make his insanity sane. Here is a lawyer who is fighting for the little guy and killing mangy dogs to get what she needs to get an airtight case. Odd? Or exactly what is needed?And come on, every writer knows when you cross the kill and animal line, you've gone over a bridge you can't rebuild. Yep she's nasty, she kills dogs whilst being a dog owner. I'm not convinced i think she might rent her dog so she can run into competing lawyers at the dog park. I'm telling you with smart, razor sharp lawyers anything is possible. To an accomplished lawyer the art of lawyering is about masterful revenge; skillfully executed.

So one might think that Posh is a skinny bitch (which by the way i don't) most of us are in fact damaged in some way or another, but this is the real deal: a woman who earns her bread by making mincemeat of others while wearing power suits and a laser type glance that may in fact peel paint off walls if targeted correctly.

A real smart bitch is worth watching; it makes me wonder how many people plot and plan in their lives which is a little unsettling but I'm just happy i finally have something popcorn worthy that isn't a rerun...and doesn't involved fat people trying to lose weight or loose people trying to get laid.

More like e-fricking annyoying

I am married and happily and not dating. But i have many friends who are either still single or newly single because of break ups or divorce. So this is not one of those stories where i'm pretending to have a friend who is really me. This is in fact about a 'real' friend, not a fake one.

Apparently in the time that i have been married going out to the bar, getting wasted and hooking up with your next significant or husband has apparently either become not cool or just doesn't happen anymore. I think you still get drunk and meet people but it's not defined as relationship material it's just a drunken screw, (again i'm mostly surmising from friend anecdotal evidence). So this means that instead of finding the next of love of your life wearing vodka glasses you are indeed trying to find them while you are on a office break, high on caffeine and checking your e-harmony account.

I have never understood the e-harmony or anything about online dating. for one simple reason. Gut instinct. you know you meet some guy and his eyes click with yours and you immediately feel like shoving your tongue down his throat or running blindly as far and as quickly as you can away from him. That's gut instinct and it doesn't work no matter what font they happen to be typing in online....

okay so this friend got an account at e harmony and then realized first it's a long process with questions back and forth like : do you like cats? how long is your hair? what do you think about capris in winter? are you big breasted? do you eat seafood? which by the way all sound like fake questions trying to ascertain something else entirely like are you crazy? will you have sex on the first date? would it bother you if i farted in public? can i stalk you? which is probably closer to what they might really want to ask.

So this friend is already irritated by the experience, plus she can't get a read of what they're really like and then you can't test chemistry (which really is what it's all about) online. Then to make it worse during a meeting with higher ups the e harmony twits send an audio clip saying she has an e harmony request....!!!!! It's loud enough that the entire group in the office hears....

So after nearly dying of non harmony feelings like e harmony hate, e-anger and e-irritation; she calls and cancel the e-annoyance right away. seriously what stupid f**k would want that as an audio arrival!

So here's the thing; online despite what people want to believe is not real life. an email or a blog for instance is not representative of the real deal. on line dating is akin to me like online eating. you couldn't taste it, smell it or sense it. it makes it safe but not particularly fun or real.

what ever happened to finding love over a bud light, or meeting your best friends ex and really feeling that magic click after she tells you she still has a special place for him in her heart...

but seriously correct me if i'm wrong but isn't lust or love or any of its equivalents all about chemistry, feelings, and the spark that really happens when you physically meet someone? Hey listen i've heard all the stories about people who get married from meeting them online. I have a friend (again nameless) and i met the dude she met online in person. Seriously - she's either blind deaf and dumb or in the year and a half since her divorce her ideals have dropped by about 10,000 feet and landed with a splat. She said they had a meeting of the minds, they 'understood' each other. and i suppose that's cool but if that package also happened to be attached to a belly that looked like it belonged on a pregnant lady, trucker hats and a voice that said, "She's a hottie' and then he'd slap her ass while all our mouths hit the floor. I wouldn't give a shit if we'd had a meeting of the minds because pretty soon my foot would be meeting his ass as i kicked him out the door. Love is not that blind. And a meeting of the minds is great, but when they full package aint' there they're called friends for a reason...

anyway i think e harmony and the like are more like e-annoying and e-faking it to get laid, but i'm wrong about a lot of things so who knows.

I'd rather see my friends with a good bottle of wine, a dance floor and a few options that are actually in the same room as her.... because call me crazy but i think you have a better chance of hooking up if you actually meet the person - not waste your time reading their words...or find out if they like birds.

a

I don't have big tits, but i love croissant

i love Paris. It truly does have that je ne sais quoi kind of special quality but then there are the more notable things that i like about Paris -it's people. I've heard the complaints about insufferable, snotty nosed servers who look at you with disgust and disdain - but truthfully the only french waiter i ever encountered like that was in New York.

After a recent trip to LA i realized that like many parts of the world there is a new breed of person, they're popping up from Johannesburg, to LA and these people have tweeked noses, colour altered hair, big sunglasses, little to no body hair and even larger tits, or calves as the case may be. You may be on Robertson and you see them from a far -and they look okay, perhaps even great, then they get closer and closer and they begin to look odd. It is as if there are a puzzle that a two year old has jammed together and the pieces don't quite fit.

I don't get it. I've never been a fame of fake, i get the whole you want to be attractive and look your best i'm not sure though why it needs to include multiple surgeries, and breasts that can leak internally. I've had the two kids and gosh i shave my legs and armpits, sometimes even wax, but i don't think women should be entirely hairless. To me that's a freaky as being too hairy. And what's with all this ball shaving?? I mean seriously are balls really that hairy?

The point i'm making is that I think all this crazy debt, fakery and faux tits and big sunglasses are all connected. People spend most of their time wanting and trying and kind of forget the actual living part. I have smallish boobs, always have and honestly i've never had any complaints and if i'd had any i would have told the guy to f8ck himself. I mean more than a handful is wasted on most people. And really if all your friends are noticing is the car you're driving, then they're not friends they're appraisers. Does any of it really matter. Plus there is the scary coincidence i've noticed, these Faux Peeps tend to talk about celebrities, dieting, man problems and shopping and not much else except gossip which leads me further to believe that the real reason they get the boobs and the hair and crap is because they really don't have much substance for for some bizarre reason they think Prada bags are more important than really connecting with someone. You can't really connect over a fat free latte while you talk about Britney Spears.

I hate to say it but i don't even really look at people all that much. I'd hate to think these people spend 45 grand on a new upper body and when they pass me all i'm thinking about is if i have lemons at home for that quinoa recipe i want to make....So i was watching pre superbowl advert about Visa cards and the song says 'i want it now.' seriously it's about a guy buying a large screen tv. What the dude really needs to buy is a book by Hemingway and a how to book on what exactly it means when your credit card debt is at an interest rate of 11%. You might want it now but you'll be paying for it forever.

All this is to say that i like myself and i don't have a new handbag or even a new haircut. I have small boobs and i've never had hair extensions. So yeah, i like the french because they're comfortable in their skin. The ladies there can have bigger noses, smaller boobs, no sunglasses, and yet they carry themselves with such grace because they like themselves they seem gorgeous in their imperfections. I think they might have crotch hair! vive la difference.

off to get a croissant.
a

Recession? Sex is cheap.

well, surprise surprise after months and months of "is it?" "isn't it?" the question looks to be getting a bit of a YES. It looks like the United States is heading towards a recession.

First things that comes to mind; you know when a girl has a mole and is ugly they call it a mole, but when a girl is beautiful like say Cindy Crawford and she has a 'mole' they call it a 'beauty mark' uh huh. Well if you call a recession say 'a break from spending' or 'time to spend more time at home' 'or a spending holiday' perhaps we too can make a 'recession' less scary or ugly. It's doesn't all have to be bad, instead of tightening our belts, we can spend less and just take our pants right off...

First - everyone spends to much f&cking money on crap. I know because i've got kids and they want want want, they have been taught to be little consumers by the media and frankly also by their sometimes ridiculous can't say no parents. Now i'd like to say that people the consumers are just the idiots; you know you shouldn't spend what you don't have but hey - you've got a credit card so you do spend too much.... what you don't figure on is this massive thing called interest sometimes to the tune of 18-24%. But it's not just stupid people it's governments. They all overspend, they're all in debt; the U.S. has massive debt. They've spent what they don't have and they don't have a bank to foreclose on their house --- so they just keep doing it.

Somewhere, somehow we all decided we should spend all are time and money buying cheap shit made in China and then we have debt and messy, cluttered homes. If we only bough crafted good things and far less of them, because they'll cost more and stopped equating 'havism' with being important or special we'd all be better off.

There is an upside to the fact that this year or next you won't be able to afford to go to the movies or out for dinner....you'll have more sex. Sex is cheap, thrilling and unless you don't use birth control shouldn't cost you anything more down the road.

So keep your credit card in your wallet and hang your pants on the chair. It's time to 'spend more time at home.'
a

Don't kiss me, write.

with the horrible red event looming; Valentines. I have decided to put a message out there on behalf of all us women who don't want roses or chocolates. Roses are pretty but they die, if you must buy flowers, and by must i mean you leave the 'thought' of valentines completely to the wayside and just have to pick something up quick so the wife/girl/lady friend doesn't bitch then buy something growing and alive. chocolates make people fat and most of them taste like crap.

Okay so i generally have never liked valentines gifts from men. My first one in grade seven at a really bad dance was given by a guy who thought kissing meant slobbering all over the girls face. It wasn't cute then and it stills runs shivers up my spine in the icky bad way. Then came the stuffed animal which frankly was almost worse than the spit. A bear holding a heart that i would have liked to shove done his smiling mouth . Small children like stuffed animals or at least some of them do and i suppose there are some nutters out there who liked stuffed animals and probably waste their money collecting them. Sadness. Stuffed animals are for small children, not your lover, not your girlfriend and certainly not someone you want a blow job from. yes i am aware of the man goal for valentines and it's not found in heart shaped box. The most you're going to get from a stuffed animal is a cuddle or a punch in the face if you know me...

anyway i won't lie and say money can't buy love because well we all know it can't really buy true love but it can be substituted for what you might get from love. Ie. you take the yacht because well it's a yacht and sure you wouldn't die for him, but you'd do pretty much anything else because well he gave you a yacht. Home in Paris, 5 plus carat diamond and small island can be substituted for said yacht but you know what i mean..anyone whose really been in love knows it more a pain in the ass than great so well avoiding it at all costs can be emotionally frigid but economically advantageous. terrible but true. love can hurt.

i'm not generally the kind of girl who is motivated by gifts. I like to work hard and get a paycheck but i believe you pay for everything you get and frankly the price with dudes who want to buy apartments and such is too high. i decided i was a good girl two years after university when a wealthy business man asked if he could buy me an apartment in new york and he'd visit once a week for 'business' while his wife and kids stayed in his home city. I politely declined. I'm not really the accommodating type.

So now with my lovely man and valentines around the corner i know what i want; a letter. a real love letter; not dirty talk masquerading as the 'real' deal and i actually abhor the word love generally; it's overused. People love waffles and veggie wraps and Britney Spears (or at least they did). What i want is a letter telling me not that i'm loved but why.

So there you go that's what i want for valentines a real, old fashioned, in dark ink letter - not an email, not an IM. And yes he could definitely seal it with a kiss.

a